Last night, my husband Jim and I went to see Paul Simon perform in Nashville on his ‘So Beautiful or So What’ tour.  Hard to believe that this man is nearly 70 years old and has been performing over 50 of those.  He looked and sounded like a performer at his peak. We thoroughly enjoyed the concert, as well as the venue – The Ryman Theatre in Nashville, aka the original Grand Ole Opry.  Our motivation for attending this particular concert was that a member of the band, Mick Rossi, was a friend of Jim’s in New Jersey back in the 70s.

Try Out Your Camera’s Settings

I decided that I would not take my ‘good’ camera with the big lens and lots of settings.  I just took my little Nikon Coolpix ‘point and shoot’ camera.  I was there to enjoy the concert, not to take pictures, but I still wanted to snap a few for posterity!  I had noticed a setting on the Nikon that read, ‘High ISO.’  Now, I thought that was a setting that helps you take pictures in low light situations, but I didn’t know for sure how it worked, so I snapped a few on the High ISO setting, and a few on the automatic setting, hoping that some would come out.

Use Picasa’s Properties to See the Settings

When I imported my pictures to the computer and took a look, sure enough, I had some that were too dark and some that were OK.  But how can I know for sure that it was due to the High ISO setting?  Picasa will show you.  All you have to do is click the i button in the lower right corner and that will open up the Properties Panel.  Now, whatever picture you select in the library – all the properties of that picture will be displayed on the right side – including the ISO setting!

 

Yep!  The dark ones had an ISO of 80 and the good ones were 1600.  Lesson learned!

You might wonder if you can just add Fill Light to the dark pictures – yes, but they will look very grainy.  You might also wonder how I added the names, Paul Simon and Mick Rossi – I used Picasa’s Text Tool.

Members may want to view the following tutorial video.

Adding Captions to your Photos

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